Hey, you — yes, you. Did you know there’s a new type of debt quietly piling up, growing a little larger every single day?
It’s called verification debt, and it’s all the verification and documentation work that — accelerated, above all, by AI — we push to later, because things are working and we’re in a hurry to ship the next feature.
Of course, “later” never comes. And in the meantime, we start building decisions, processes, and products on top of foundations nobody has actually verified.
Eventually, we end up trusting things we’ve never really checked. Metrics we take at face value. Assumptions never tested. Systems that work, sure — but if someone one day asks “exactly how?” we won’t have an answer.
We Are Accumulating Invisible Debt
We are accumulating a new kind of invisible debt — more insidious than classic technical debt — because today we can tell an LLM “optimise this process,” but if we don’t check how the process was optimised, we’ll never know whether the machine made a mess of it and actually made things worse, or not.
And the larger the organisation grows, the more sophisticated this debt becomes — until it stops being a technical problem and turns into a cultural and leadership one.
From “We Didn’t Have Time” to “We Never Built the Context”
At some point, we won’t be able to say “we didn’t have time to verify” anymore. We’ll be forced to admit that we never built an environment where verification was considered necessary in the first place.
Think about your own organisation: can you say with confidence how many of the things you’re making decisions on today have actually been verified — and how many are simply accepted?
The Real Cost: Eroded Trust
Personally, I’ve come to realise that the real cost isn’t in any single problem or error that this accumulating debt will inevitably produce. The real cost is the misplaced trust — in ourselves, in our ability to verify — that will slowly erode if the people around us start doubting the data, the processes, or the foundations.
Everything slows down. Decisions, execution, teams. Everything.
Start Verifying Today
We need to start reducing our verification debt — starting now. In practice, that means stopping occasionally and asking: is this actually true?
So where do you stand?
Are you on team “move fast and fix later” or team “trust, but verify”?